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The second-rate photo gallery July 11, 2016

The problem with trying to take photos for a blog while doing field work is that I don’t really have time to wait for the right lighting for a scene, or hope that an animal will come closer or stop moving. I take one or two photos and they either turn out or they don’t. Here are some from the second-rate gallery—they weren’t totally disasters, but they don’t have enough detail be particularly interesting in and of themselves. I guess they might help prove that I’m not making things up.

Exhibit A:

This is a moth I saw that looked like the love child of an orange-winged butterfly and a metallic blue wasp. It’s from a family of moths called Sesiidae, which all have skinny wasp-like wings, frequently with clear spots on them. This one kept crawling and flying around, even though it was having trouble getting anywhere.

Exhibit B:

A pair of praying mantises mating. Honest. Taking photos of anything in a tree backlit by the sky is hard. On my way back, I wasn’t able to find them again, so I don’t know whether the male survived the experience.

Exhibit C:

Speaking of backlighting, there’s pair of bare-throated tiger herons nesting in a tree right by the lab. Which is cool, except the nest is right over a path and there’s about a five-foot-wide bird poop splash zone. Tiger herons are pretty big.